This study deals with the measurement of service quality at cellular retail outlets in the South African environment. The focus is on perception and expectation of service quality from the customer’s perspective. A literature review was conducted on, models of measurement for service quality. The research was conducted via a structured questionnaire based on the SERVQUAL model. Primary data was gathered via telephonic interviews from a sample of 583 customers. The total scale reliability for this study is 0.95, indicating an overall higher reliability factor than the Parasuraman et al. study. The findings further indicated that two of the dimensions, namely, tangibles and reliability are loading into separate factors. The remaining three dimensions, responsiveness, assurance and empathy all load into one factor, indicating that there is no real differentiation amongst the three dimensions in the customer’s mind.

Looks at the implementation of total productive maintenance (TPM) at one South African mill and attempts to establish the influence that this journey has had on productivity, employee development, quality improvement and organisational change within the manufacturing unit. A literature survey was undertaken into the methodologies, including a look at the so-called``soft issues'' or people issues to evaluate the benefits of adopting a TPM strategy. Questionnaires were also sent out to a sample of selected people at all levels of the organisation to find out their views on the methodology being used. Concludes that this journey has been successful in spite of the difficulties specific to South Africa. The final objective of this research was to establish whether the implementation of this process had resulted in change within the mill. Increases in productivity, quality and a reduction in the cost of producing the product resulted in the mill winning a gold award from the National Productivity Institute.

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